When The Real Housewives of New York returned for its ninth season, it brought a very familiar face back to New York City: Tinsley Mortimer. The ex-socialite suffered a pretty miserable downfall after separating from Upper East Side royalty Topper Mortimer, moving to West Palm Beach, dating an allegedly abusive boyfriend 10 years her junior, and winding up with a mugshot after an arrest for trespassing on said boyfriend's property. A RHONY castmate took her in when she moved back to the city, but does Tinsley Mortimer still live with Sonja Morgan?
According to the New York Post, Tinsley is back on her own while she looks for an apartment. She moved out of Sonja's Upper East Side townhouse in March and has reportedly been living in a midtown hotel while she looks for her own place. As for what neighborhood she's searching in, she tells the Post, "I’m still an uptown girl. I just don’t know if the uptown girl wants to live downtown."
Her preference for living uptown isn't surprising. It's where her ex-husband's extremely prestigious family was based, and she finished her bachelor's degree in art history uptown at Columbia University while Topper was downtown at NYU. Tinsley also made a name for herself as part of the upper echelon of New York City society, so the less elite, younger, "new money" crowd downtown isn't exactly her sweet spot. She seems eager to reenter her old society scene, apparently unaware of the fact that it's lost some of its status and luster in a post-recession New York.
"I look back at my old New York life like, 'Wow, that was so glamorous and a really good time in my life and really fun,'" she told the Post. "Why did I walk away from all that?"
Tinsley still works as the director of events for an office in West Palm Beach while she continues to produce her line of tableware. She's also reportedly in counseling in New York to work through her last relationship and "to be more respectful of [herself]." While she seems a tiny bit unaware of how the atmosphere in New York has changed in the time since she's been gone, it's obvious that Tinsley returned with a genuine desire for a fresh start, wanting to get back the parts of her life that she missed, while moving forward from the parts that were destructive. Whether RHONY can help her do that or not, we'll probably have to wait until the reunion show to find out.
